this is on open internet but has NO indexed links meaning the url of the
page does not show up on google
any identifying name or number (which would be googleable) will be
broken up to make it ungoogleable
sent 17 April (easter Sunday) 2022
Dear Est [i] ,
I hope you are ok.
Once again a worrying turn in world affairs. I wonder what these
things really do to the mind-sets of your generation? I hope you are not
too freaked. Brexit, pandemic and now this. You have had a tough rather
depressing, introduction to adulthood. Sorry, one thing I cannot be blamed for.
:-)
But i empathise...
No matter what you may think, every second of my life you are still my
North Star. Always have been, always will be no matter what. I only think of
anything ongoing in the world in terms of what it may mean for you. When
something worrying happens in the world – a war breaks out on European soil, as
i have been since day one, i am only thinking of you. Hoping not for myself it
doesn’t go nuclear but only for you. Worriedly listening to what is going on.
And i don’t think we are safe yet. I have researched a lot of the better
thought on Putin and despite some saying he was provoked, all that matters is
him in the future and evidence suggests it is not simple
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj_KTeJKHRg&ab_channel=HooverInstitution
Here is one talk i think quite rational in analysis (Ferguson i mean
warning extreme caution – i agree)
And then all these costs going back up (like they did in my teens into
20s) ... air travel i hear going astronomical. That hurts me to hear as i
assume you still like your travelling?
Look i just want to share one or two last things. Mainly BOOKS – all i
care about is a load of books very hard for me to keep hold of that are only
for you. If for some reason you get this and are in a good mood about it i so
need help moving them. And a good sort of them – for you. It would be a tragedy
if they were for some reason lost. My health wobbles. I know no one i can trust
to look after them for you yet though am working on it.
Incidentally i have no idea if my email addresses work – by which i mean
mail com and gmail wrongly puts a lot of outbound into spam. I don’t live at
Eyw**d any more so i must give up that temporary email address. I wish only one
new permanent rest of life email. That you know and have on your white list if
you ever want to resume communication. I was trying out protonmail
i dont like it. i will send this from my three emails maybe some will
disappear due spam filters, that’s the only reason.
You have my number (due finances it may not be 100% reliable in future)
07727 ***304
And keep https://leftovers2022.blogspot.com/
So as i say the thing that i wish i could share the most or pass
over is that i still have a load of boxes of good literature only
collected for the you the last 7 years. Added to a good collection i already
had. When i got my weird virus illness 2014 and couldn’t work for three
years, still my only objective in life was to try and build the best collection
of good literature for you. I bought many. (if nothing else you can sell
them – 3 or 4 grands worth... your choice!) I also have a few other boxes
of things that you may well still find useful. As i have been packing the last
year i made up a few boxes of things i no longer needed any 23 year old
may find useful.
I shall come back to the books. I have had a very tough winter in many
ways and some days i think I am probably not that far from expiry.
The last few years have taken a toll on me! And to be honest i don’t have
the strength and focus to even remember what i have tried to share with you in
the last two years – though have deliberately kept it minimal.
So, due gentrification, i lost at last the tenancy i had at the old
ruins. It was long coming. The rents went up 50% recently. Real full on gentrification:
only middle class wealthier families wanted. (it’s a total apartheid now –
really problematical). This is the main reason i would love to try and pass
these books on to you.
I have already moved them twice in six months. A bit too much now for an
ageing old chap after a hard winter. And i do wish to at least move to a
different part of the country as soon as i can. Time for fresh horizons for me.
But can’t lug all these books with me, yet.
But on – well....I was having one of many long philosophical walks a few
months ago and i had a thought that I want to share . Everything i ever would
wish to communicate or share is 100% neutral.
Nearly 60 (gosh its heavy to write that) for most all notions of
what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in any past act or period is long long
gone...ancient history that concerns me not. My age it is just about trying to
keep one ticking over. Past matters fade into not being important ....
Anyway i was pondering how myself i had a quite different attitude
through the 2020 and 21 period to anyone else i encounter. Right from the start
of the pandemic. Plenty of things like environmental damage constantly trouble
me; but for me it is almost like i had been mentally preparing to have to
survive what came along (across society) in 2020 all my life. It suited my
mentality – didn’t bug me.
What i have to share here is for ‘you’ - helping me appreciate you
are going to be entirely different to me, so i would not even begin to
understand your persona. It is not opinion on anything wished or
not wished. It is just a stark realisation of reality. It is beyond simple
standard ‘rules’ of life – one being all humans at some point need to know what
they are from - who their parents were.
So i was pondering how i had been so so different in my outlook in 2020
to anyone else i knew ...And then i realised something which is how even if we
know we have ‘matured’ and had all sorts of life changing experience and
achievement into our 20s and 30s, deep down there was a person in me which was
still there very very specifically, the person i was around age 12 or
13... and then also a way of approaching life from my early 20s was still
my deepest default setting.
Both these periods of my life i know were unusual. Rare compared to
almost anyone i ever know anything about. In my teens i was this
extremely independent boy who would just go off alone into the
surrounding fairly wild countryside day after day. It wasn’t some
entirely happy thing, but it was for all sorts of reasons “me”. We are just who
we are. What our experiences are. In other words it was so normal for
me(by that age) to not think very much of the comings and goings in human
family and household or any community. My day out in the wilds was
simply my main experience. I suppose i spent a lot of my time just adjusting to
always being comfortable with almost nothing, off outdoors... a book in
my backpack and some nuts and fruit, was my norm. Days just dodging
weather. Enjoying the very beautiful places when i found them. Sometimes just
needing quiet anywhere not at home and finding ways (in my head) to survive the
monotony of days outdoors alone.
And then in my 20s my work was curiously similar. I had a workday almost
unique: after a few hours flying some business person to somewhere
- often in Europe, the rest of my day was spent alone looking for simple
sustenance, a good walk, exploring some new region, and some peaceful solitary spot
to busy my mind in a book i would always have as company in my pack. Totally
me. All else unimportant.
Thing is it’s not about books, it is about from early on having a
setting that i didn’t really have anywhere else to go ever than just keep
myself reasonably happy by settling down in some natural spot. Oblivious to
human activity and drama elsewhere. I know i am not a psychopath (see defn) but
i also know i just don’t get sucked into ordinary human drama or even the
ordinary routine fear that most do...being so much in nature sort of balances
that out of you. Really is about being in the moment.
And that is what i reverted to doing a lot in covid. Being that person.
And the frightening stuff on news, and even the angsty way almost
everyone i met for months, just didn’t get to me at all... i took
myself ASIDE (in many ways physical and mental) ... still am.
I mention this – my dull past. Only in that it made me think of
something which is that i know my inner setting is so so different to
nearly everyone else. That i realised in 2021. Was thinking about it a few
weeks ago. Many people seemed so tied up in the drama of it all – either way:
those wishing to hide and mask forever and then some i know who are completely
against all that, but still even they got so sucked in to caring and being
angry about their views on it all. I knew i was different inside – sort
of aside the whole drama. And i know it is from a very very close to nature
setting within me carved into my brain age 12or 13 and on... but those years 12
13 i think are where the carving is deepest.
SO i mention this because it made me realise that you and i will be
entirely different deep down in respect of our innate self. I dont think that
innate self ever leaves us even if for years maybe we cannot see it – it is
really cast in iron at that age. That self i think stays within us for
life. It is fashionable to speak of development and change as we move into
adulthood but i am not sure our true deep personality we started to develop at
13 or so ever leaves us.
You will have had quite a different routine existence to me (as 99% others
have also ) around those crucial years of greatest personality
formation – maybe 11 to 13 or 14....and thus you will be of a nature that is
completely different to anything i know well or i can easily relate
to... maybe that is some ‘freedom’ for you? Deep down of course i would
accept any person no matter what they are if they are my only kid. That is the
job of the parent. That is what love is. And anyway most of
my life i have bobbed between so so many different cultural types – i accept
everyone!
Anyway i just wanted to share that...
There is one other thing but it is for me big – or may have been, but is
the greatest silver lining i have had in my life. It is that when i was
on an aeroplane to South America December 2017 - utterly done in, still
ill, hadn’t slept 2 days, I met the most interesting and in fact wonderful
woman i have probably ever met. Talk about a ‘silver lining’.
You would on face value find my choice bizarre. No it was her absolute
sincerity and a kind of dedication to justice and helping less well off people.
She was famous in Brussels, her home, for this. She founded and run a large
organisation for culture and social inclusion. She was given
millions of Euros by government to run her organisation. Here she is https://www.france24.com/fr/20180406-mode-bruxelles-mad-own-karakatsanis-hauert-thierry-rondenet-herve-yvrenogeau
Her organisation was always aimed at providing work and opportunities
mainly for the refugees and other vulnerable people at the bottom.
Anyway sadly i will probably never see her again but i would write to
her sometimes from 2018 and she didn’t reply. To my huge surprise she at last
wrote something to me in December 2021. I have tried to keep an alive
correspondence with her since then. It has been very wonderful to have
some words with her again. It changed my whole year. I did fall ‘in love’ with
her but also never valued any woman so much (more important than ‘love’). She
is extremely good at dealing with difficult things in families over children.
She had a very turbulent childhood (not unlike yours ) and has three children
and two separations to her name – but is so so wise and deep. I asked her to marry
me within about 30 minutes of meeting her. She never said definitely not.
Speaking with her – we spoke 8 hours non stop, I really understood how
some people do manage to entirely move on - she is so good at not letting
any pain or conflict from the past affect her at all.
It may surprise you she was ultra fashionista... as you may appreciate i
never have been. As she knows. . Peoples lifestyles are so unimportant. A
centred peaceful soul is 100 times more what its about... as is wisdom. I
was intending to go and see her in spring 2020. After brexit done – my effort
there done, time to find her. And then...not possible!!! Oh woe is me. SO be
it.
So as i say i have no need ever to think of the past but here are
some notes on it maybe you need to hear.
This section is so so unimportant. But perhaps to you it is. And what is
important to you is all that matters. Though it is just better words about things
long ago i try to write now. I don’t feel any need to say anything. But
if you ever did this is what i would say.
What i would like to ask you is would you like to know a few facts from
long long ago? They will never be accusatorial of anyone, if you did.
They are so long ago. And in respect of past ‘events’ between two people
– you and I, whatever you need of course is most important but at my end at my
age, it is rather nice how ‘events’ from the past so pale into irrelevance. I
do not mean that they are not life-changing at the time (and we ALL make
mistakes or “do crazy things when we are wounded” – to quote a great Tom
Waits song), but i mean i know that compared to other people – their life
stories, their major events, their sins, their sadly painful periods when
things go very weird for them, there simply is nothing in yours and mine that
is any problem. And so little in my life problematical as it interwove with
others.
In fact that is really the only thing to say. Context in this instance
is everything but let me put it this way. From September 2002 to spring
2005 - with a 9 month break, a battle raged for being with you.
“custody”. These things are done ‘on paper’. That means that over maybe 10 or
so individual ‘days’ in court fighting - a day or so in court every
few months, all very very forcefully against me, for each court hearing both
parties put in a days-in-the-writing, long prepared ‘statement’ of their
accusations against the other. In these statements it is normal (sadly)
for a warring parent to put every single thing they can possibly think of to
damn the other parent. And add the kitchen sink. I hardly put a
word in.
Estelle, in 100s of pages - i still have them, against me, there
is not one accusation of any kind of mistreatment of your mother. Every
other accusation (accusation!) under the sun (which were not accepted by
authorities), but none that i had ever been any danger to your mother...
it was never a feature. (many do make this a feature in courts it is the norm
to make accusations – based on fact? Or based on dodgy strategy to win cases?)
And i add one thing which again in context is even more indicative of
‘truth’. It is that in May 2004 when a court round recommenced after me being
unable to see you 9 months - and that was even ‘in the public eye’
(which means the person who had been in the media for whatever reason – me,
gets a far far harder run than any normal hearing – everything is ultra
analysed as if a judge made a decision later proved to allow some future harm
they would be crucified in public!) - and it was the most bitterly fought
against me.... i just kept mouth shut most of time, but the judge gave me
back almost straight away my full life with you. (half time ). At
the first major hearing. This simply never ever happened.
Usually – in fact almost always, a parent will hardly ever see their
child after a 9 month break in relationship, never mind with all sorts of
allegations. Or some supposedly extreme event in the past. And from this
any person can draw a fair conclusion which is that there must have been
exceptionally POSITIVE reasons (in their behaviour and attitude) for the
parent on the back foot being given any decent life with child, or even
see them again! never mind half of it almost immediately. Draw
conclusions.
Every underhanded accusation and tactic is used in courts – and all
possible tactics against me. But no one even hinted that i had ever been any
abusive person. And lets just say (famous book woman actually – presents radio
4 Book Program) Elizabeth Day (then) of The Telegraph spent a day with me
in 2006 then wrote a whole page on me. And i am sure she did plenty of
research as well that i didn’t know about. You didn’t get a page in the
Telegraph if they think you are at all dodgy. They would get crucified
too.
In fact there was something...interestingly never mentioned in all
those statements....
....but only one moment as we split up – one morning, where both of us
bubbled up. We were in the completely natural stress of a couple separating
with a young child. A terrible major life event. And in human affairs society
does tend to understand such moments as being totally out of character.
In fact that morning – the only time there was any extremely
extremely minor physicality in our home it was begun by an event which i
not only never put in any records but i also forgave immediately (a few hours
later). It was a physical act to me that was scary and so worrying at the time.
Anyone else would have called the police.
I do not. Far more scary than the allegations you repeated to me when we
last met. But i knew it was completely out of character and only due to the
stress of that moment. And thus was not for any other person ever. It
came to peace later that day. It was to be forgiven totally and forgotten.
Incidentally at
last - 6th April this year (you can hear what it was
about on radio 4 womans hour on catchup) at last about 20 years after it
was understood we should, a NO FAULT divorce at last became law. I think that
says all you need to know. SO many horrid things happen at separation. Society
has to help people draw the line and move on....
I also know something about myself. (2020 i enjoyed a lot of
walking and mulling over my own past) And none of us are perfect and sometimes
we may completely get it wrong. But it is that the defining thing of my
own life up until about 25 was firstly from age 10ish for 6 or 7 years living
in a household where there was endless unpleasant rowing and bad words. Fierce
stuff. And then trying to come to terms with that after i left age 17ish which
didnt really cease until i was about 25. It had so ruined my life. In
fact i was in a kind of PTSD for years maybe even until i was 30ish...
Because of this i really did from my early thirties only ever ever think
of how to always have as peaceful a life as humanly possible with any person
around children. It became my religion. And in fact as - for innocent
reasons of different culture and mentality, your mother and i separated,
somehow figuring some healthy row-free way we could live very close by -
even next door one another i actively proposed for a long time, and have you
between us easily, was for months my absolute only mental
focus. Not having angst between any parent with kids around to me
is just the key to life. Of course it is far harder in reality to put it into
practice.
But i know one thing – the messages in society are fairly useless and
myself i only think about peace. Very little good culture nowadays reminds us
of this [peace our children need.
As an aside if someone ever goes through my ‘papers’ they will find
something that may seem weird. A few years ago a famous woman from the House of
Lords Baroness Meyer was on the media (i have recordings) calling avidly for
new law making ‘parental alienation’ criminal. As soon as i heard this i knew i
must write to her asking her to reconsider because ALL issues between parents
in families should have as little legal nastiness attached as possible. It is
all just petrol on fires. I wrote to her last summer saying all will
happen is that everyone will just be accusing everyone else in their statements
of yet another heinous sin the other parent should be damned for.
Which will do no good. Just cause more stress .... the answer is only ever
society and the culture showing ways for us to help each other diffuse
problems. And above all forgive and forget and move on.
And i say and think exactly the same thing about anything 4 years ago. I
have no idea what you would have been ‘told’. For me i knew there was probably
more to things, and some kind of negative influence. When i turned up at the
courthouse they had refused even to list it. That never happens. And I
received basically an apology. But no detail matters. All legal matters
turn into weird out of control silliness’s. People said to me summer
four years ago i should sue the constabulary ... i could have. They
were at fault, no one else. But even that would be just more drama over
nothing. And cause stress for you which under no circumstances would i
ever want to be the originator of. Keep alive things that should just be moved
on from. I have no bad feelings about anyone. And i never, over anything,
feel anyone under about 25 or so is ‘responsible’ for anything much. Things
just happen. And young brains and personalities, as the science is clear
on, dont even fully mature and stop developing
until about 25. Sorry i hope that isn’t an insult.
Anyway my one wish for good is somehow for me to go and live in Europe
as soon as i may just be able to afford to. All my energy is focused on that
soon. But it won’t be for months unless i luc out on something. If that happens
i may not even have the same mobile number. And post.com may collapse at any
moment. It would make things so much mentally healthy for me if we could
just say hi once ... move on healthily. I havent energy for much, fear not, and
anyway there is’t much....except i wonder what you became...
Anyway i always wish to never ever email anyone again its an awful
medium, and may either leave or expire....With that in mind i leave just one
page online that maybe i can keep as some kind of findable page with a contact
email or whatever in the future. https://leftovers2022.blogspot.com/
On
that page i will also write my ‘will’, and some info about some useful things
when i keel over, though it is just a little information about what i have
collected for you over the years which is important. That said i often
wonder where should i try and get myself a slot for burial. What if you ever in
years to come wished to have a look would be best for you?
There will never be any name on that internet page or identifier of who
by or who for. And no one i know will know of it except one person i do
trust.
Maybe i will leave some details of anyone who is my backup – in the
event of my death. Who knows where things are ... though it is hard to find
anyone reliable. I would so prefer i can just have enough communication with
you so i can leave such info WITH you... there is no problem, i have no bad
feeling.... my only wish in life is just to have a bit of joy with one or
two my own age ... You must be an interesting person - i would love to know
what your experiences have been but i expect no easy relations with you...if
you wanted that i am always of course totally into a bit of rebirth...work on
happy easy relations..... nothing is impossible.
Wonderful thing about ‘cost of living crisis’ (crippling me!) and
even war is that it puts into perspective ones own life and issues. They are
nothing.... in which case it is no stress to try and get over any
little hurdle!
I put on that page a photo of the Blue book. It is my real gift to
you....
By the way i am down to the last ever ferret. Fifi – age about 10,
died of covid actually 4 weeks ago. She couldnt handle it...so its just
Leon the 4th. He is also the cuddliest best behaved ever ferret.
Don’t suppose you want him? He is very easy to keep.
I also have a truly interesting journalistic project that someone should
take on if you write? Its kindof exclusive and about a reality of post brexit i
know no one else will cover r research. I have ran it by several wiser people
my age and they know it is interesting. But some hungry young brave writerly
person needs to take it on. I know no one.
Anyway i hope you
are well. I assume this email address is closed in fact and will never write
again. I assume you won’t see it. I see your photo went off Whatsap
and i don’t know what that means as i don’t use it much.
All the best Dad
PS i do various
writing myself. If online most i like to keep hidden away incognito and private
(so many small minds my region i have had enough of small minds). I started one
rather silly project a few months ago long planned but fizzled (plug
issues i live only off grid). Though i have more to upload. And there are
several funny and deep fables i need to finish writing
Wonkyquantum.com
